


When your silver is my gold

by foughtyen



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Coming Out, F!Ashe, F/F, Improvised Gender Euphoria, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Trans Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29093229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foughtyen/pseuds/foughtyen
Summary: In gender as elsewhere, commoner girls make do.
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault/Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	When your silver is my gold

**Author's Note:**

> cw: references to suicide and drowning

Ashe angles toward the wall instead of Dorothea’s face, muttering away from her audience like the priests of Seiros did in the old rites. “I really don’t know the first thing about what I’m doing. You have lots of—let’s say—experience in this area, so that’s why i’m asking you.”

Dorothea swats even the threat of a complement from the air as if it were a mosquito. Eyes darting side to side, scoping out the unremarkable room, she sotto-voces, “This is all delightfully vague. Tell me, what are we doing that you can’t even make eye contact to explain? Are we killing a man? I’ve only played assassins on stage.” A deniably wistful pause. “Unless you want me to hold a high note, thereby breaking a glass, thereby killing him? That happened in a play once and I could still scrounge up the lung capacity.”

The words that come from Ashe’s mouth don’t form an answer. She fumbles with something in her hands, glancing down with a deferential look at the thing draped over her fingers. Her expression finally as she faces Dorothea is all the Ashe earnestness hardened by over-rehearsal. She explains, “In a way I’m looking to kill a man, but it won’t be hard. He’ll go willingly.”

Any significance in Ashe's gestures runs like rainwater on glass over Dorothea’s understanding, unimpeded. There’s a lump in her throat at the idea. It’s hard to believe that Ashe of all people has a hit list, wants someone taken out, even if only _in a way_. Dorothea should know better. Those who seem softest are merely hiding their sharpness underneath. 

That unease doesn’t linger long. She sets aside politeness and peers over Ashe’s shoulder. Nothing becomes clearer: a strangled mass of leather lies limp in Ashe’s palms. Dorothea buries a snort and puts all her excess energy into blinking, her composure challenged by the absurdity of it all. “This is two chest guards tied together. The things you use for archery? And there are two of them.”

Ashe nods, which means Dorothea hasn’t wholly lost the plot. “That’s right. And if I loosen the straps—” Her fingers are at once swift with familiarity, choppy with anticipation, slow with reverence.

“This is clearly important to you, but—” Dorothea tries again, with feeling, a flourish of the hand like a petal spinning on every axis as it falls. “ _Why_ are there two chest guards tied together?

This is a story Ashe hasn’t yet spoken, not for lack of knowing. She understands exactly what compelled her to repurpose these things. For the longest time it felt like something that deserved darkness, to remain sheltered inside of herself. That’s no way to open an explanation.

When she first tried archery at Lonato’s suggestion, the feeling that fizzed in her mind wasn’t power in directing an arrow or amazement at affecting distant objects, but comfort in the reassuring pressure of a polygon of cowhide against her chest. After it was gone, she felt its absence until the next lesson, as if something were leaking out lost. After that lesson, the sensation of lack remained until the next one, and on and on, skipping rocks against the surface of her psyche.

She doesn’t distill this into the motions for words, how the feeling has grown and seeks sunlight and blue sky. Her mind goes smooth, a lake snapped frozen. 

Dorothea has two inches on Ashe, or more in the right boots. When Ashe looks up to answer, setting her eyes straight ahead lands her focus squarely on the teardrop dip of Dorothea’s philtrum. A stray glance down at her lips and Ashe makes out the luster of a slight rouge, just a shade off-nude. Her thoughts go luxuriously blank.

“Ashe?” Dorothea calls out across a canyon of inches.

As an afterthought Ashe grabs the question still lingering in the air, _why is this_? “When you’re as small as I am, you don’t need a lot of support.”

Like a river carved to the sea in a second, the connection clicks in Dorothea’s head with noise and force. “You _do_ want to kill a man, but that man is— was— yourself? Your current— former, you know.” Her hands usher away the confusing knot of referenced time.

In a small voice for telling secrets and plotting conspiracies, Ashe agrees. “Something like that. He dies, so she rises. In fact, he might already be dead.”

Dorothea furls a hand to her breastbone, fingers spread. “My, that’s fiercely poetic.”

“I don’t care if it’s poetic,” Ashe says for the first time since she learned how to read, “I just want to get through this.” Ashe doesn’t know what _this_ means beyond a vague sense of changing, movement-to-somewhere-elseness. When this much she hasn’t said out loud to another person, hasn’t even put to paper. Yet now as it fades from the air, the plain truth of it reaches her bones.

Dorothea blows a resigned raspberry. “Well, teaching you how to fake your own death and live under a new identity is out of my skill set.”

Ashe adds this to the mental list of plot points she’s drawn up to describe her reality: cross-dressing to fit in leading to reluctance to go back, body-switching finding a form that fits closer to the soul, a new reality in a dreamscape becoming permanent. Faking her own death curls neatly among them, snug and heat-seeking like a cat.

Dorothea watches Ashe’s eyes move through the low arcs of processing. “What I could do though, is sing a song about it. One of the ones that sounds cultured and —refined—” she stretches the word to taffy with her fluttering head-voice, “but that’s raunchy once you scrape off the diction.”

“I might die of embarrassment, but at least in an affirming way.” Ashe imagines Dorothea narrating any of the scenarios in her head. An overture. What’s she supposed to do with her hands as the melody swells, as she moves in time with Dorothea’s voice carrying her across a stage? As far as deaths by embarrassment go, not bad. A song would make it fifty-fifty.

“Another thing I can definitely help you with, maybe too well, and with nobody dying, is tits.”

“Tits,” Ashe repeats, like she’s been let in on a secret.

Dorothea shrugs. “Up, down, all around.”

Ashe reddens. “That’s the, um, experience I was saying you have.”

“And you’re here about your bra there. That’s what it’s supposed to be, right, a bra—may I?” Her voice rises stepwise, like the terraced farms that climb hillsides in Brigid. Her fingers lift in handshapes for conducting an unseen orchestra.

“Yes, please. I don’t know why it’s doing this _now_. It’s like untangling spaghetti.”

Dorothea makes fast work of the cords. Ashe notices two fingers on either hand are short-nailed, but that does nothing to slow her speed. Working the improvised leather bra around Ashe’s bust, she holds back the wild straps with the care afforded the head of a drunken friend leaned over a chamber pot.

“I thought you would have stronger fingers, given all the time you spend drawing arrows.” She curls her index and middle fingers, the ones with filed-down nails, and wiggles them together in the air, as if slowly scratching an itch.

“I usually do.” Only after the words scatter and Dorothea’s fingers are elsewhere does Ashe realize the comment may have had sparks behind it.

“Hm.” Dorothea ties half a knot and taps a spot between the lowest parts of Ashe’s shoulder blades. “Touch here for me.”

Ashe slips her finger out from beneath the careful bow Dorothea ties atop it and takes the first breath of the rest of her life.

Dorothea lays one hand on Ashe’s shoulder and the other in the small of her back. “Okay. How does it feel?”

All of the trading of touch makes Ashe feel lighter than air, but that’s not what Dorothea’s asking about. She swallows to buy a second she doesn’t need. Now that she’s here, the words come easy. “It’s different with someone else in the room. it’s—like I’m finally looking the right way after a long time walking backward. It’s— I’m— disoriented, woozy, fantastic.” Ashe accepts the leather contraption for the ad hoc assemblage it is: more straps than necessary, restrictive in places, but a signpost for an easier way to exist.

“So thinking long-term, is the goal like—?” Dorothea cups her hands at Ashe’s chest like dual sconces and shakes them as if a weight had fallen into her palms. “Just so you know, if they’re really big, you can get back pain. Ask me how I know.”

“Goals aside, I think I know where I’m likely to end up on the tiddies to tatas scale.” 

Dorothea tilts her head in sympathy. “Aw, that’s okay. Girls with small boobs have big hearts.”

“Really, you think so?”

“Oh, I know so.” She blinks long and gives half a nod. When her eyes open once more they sparkle with intent.

Dorothea joins their palms, lacing their fingers. Her hands are warm and soft. Ashe worries that if she looks at the lifelines, she’ll want to remember them to take to a fortune teller, forgetting everything else.

A moment and a lifetime pass. Dorothea drapes Ashe’s hand casually over the round of her breast. The way her palm curves, as if asking for something— this is an answer.

Once more ashe looks everywhere, at everything but Dorothea as her heart flutters at hummingbird pace. She’s ninety-nine percent sure Dorothea can’t feel its rapid beating through the layers of leather, but also sure the volume echoes through every bone in her body. She can’t have both.

With a confident half-step forward between Ashe’s legs, Dorothea closes the space between them hip-first. Ashe’s face flushes redder than an Ailell pomegranate, peel or seeds or juice. Dorothea most definitely catches that.

“You don’t need to be nervous. I have terrible luck with men, but women? I know a thing or two, new girl.” Her voice strides across _girl_ in a way that holds Ashe tight and leaves her dizzy.

Ashe holds out her hand as if asking for a dance. “Will you teach me?”

With an amused smile and a hand hot to the touch, Dorothea accepts.

They lock eyes and Ashe learns, even without words: how want coils around the flecks of pigment in Dorothea’s irises, her pupils greedy for light. A knowing glint hides in their depths, the last gasps of illumination passing through a gem and hitting all the inside edges, suggesting secrets. Within her is heat enough to sear them both like a Thoron bolt to the core. What a way to go. Ashe can’t look away, for wonder of what she’ll miss.

Dorothea parts her mouth leisurely, with all the patience of a flower opening to the sun. Their bottom lips nearly meet, barely brush. an almost-weight like a feather on a scale. The anticipation of it feels like an absence. To fill it, Ashe leans in to kiss her. Dorothea leans back. Her rouged lips, pouting aloof, tease upward, the enticing fruit just out of reach, sweet apple reddening on the highest branch.

Ashe settles for her neck instead, pale and smooth and offered. She starts where the skin retreats into the dips of clavicle, works higher from there. Encouraged by Dorothea’s hand at her back, she proceeds to the point where jaw softens to throat. Then Dorothea speaks.

With a thunderclap voice she announces trancelike, simultaneously to a thousand people and Ashe alone, “Learn how to make and be made, break and be broken—”

Again Ashe is breathless, as if Dorothea has siphoned it right from her lungs. Enough remains in her to ask, “What do you mean?” 

That lets Dorothea fall out of it, how the sky opens after a storm, refreshed. Her eyebrows raise in a look of _hm?_ “You don’t know _Banks of the Airmid_? Maybe it’s not popular in the kingdom. I’m just quoting a monologue. It felt appropriate.”

A play! Ashe would swoon if she weren’t already in Dorothea’s arms, her knees weak to adept allusion.

“Wait— I do know it!” It wasn’t nestled among the classics in Lonato’s library, but she’d read it in the early weeks of the semester, before the evenings started to chill. At the end of the first act, the minor nobleman in the spring of his life, typically played by a woman, speaks metaphorically of the crash and chaos of two larger allies going to war with each other. With desperation mounting, nowhere else to turn, he walks into the Airmid to drown. Protected by the goddess’s favor, he walks bank to bank, emerging on the other side with the wisdom of how to resolve the conflict. It wasn’t popular in Faerghus, not just for the geographic distance, or for depicting infighting among nobility, but because the visceral horror at doing anything like that in the kingdom’s frigid waters outweighed its dramatic potential, even as a climax.

“So this is your far bank. You made it.” Dorothea cradles Ashe’s head in her hands. Pressing nose to cheek and lip to lip, she breathes in and kisses out.

Ashe sees stars. Her breathing is a beat off. No matter, this is the tempo she wants to live by. As Dorothea’s mouth presses to hers, she feels more woman. It’s as easy as stepping into the sea and floating, buoyed by the tide.

When Dorothea pulls away, her lips are a shade less red and Ashe is several shades more.

“Oh, that was— I’m— did you learn that for the stage?” The question loses its sense as she asks it. A booming voice, maybe, but stitches in breath, intended only for the next mouth over—the scale in Ashe’s mind is all wrong if tiny cues travel long distances. Everything was close. A world like that would have a night sky with stars as pickable as fruit, a moon you could hit your head on.

Dorothea shakes her head mere millimeters in each direction. “That? No. Stage kisses are for other people. People you don’t want to kiss, half the time.” She moves around hair that falls at Ashe’s eyebrow. “It’s just us here.”

“Does that mean you wanted to kiss me?” Ashe blinks, optic nerve spewing static to her eyeballs, dazzling her vision with a radiating, fractal pattern. In her thoughts, the frequency of surprise cancels out anything more coherent than “Wow, thanks” that overflows past her lip.

Dorothea smiles, pleased. “I’ll even kiss you again, but let’s get this off you, shall we? It puts too much distance between us. I have plans.”

Ashe nods. She appreciates a good plan, the one thing she hasn’t had as she’s groped meanderingly forward in this process. Even if for the next five minutes— well, Dorothea probably has more than five minutes worth of ideas, but maybe if— she’s pulled out of spiraling qualifications by Dorothea’s hands spreading beneath the leather. A bloom of someone else against her. It’s the perfect heat and weight, releasing in Ashe a full-bodied tone like a hammer on the string of a clavichord. 

This isn’t the ending she envisioned, Dorothea in her hands instead of the chest guard-contraption. She was so ready for the weight of womanhood, always imagined it as additive: a layer of powder, a length of hair, a swelling chest. She believed the item, the addition, was key to become something different, like a pegasus becoming more than the sum of a horse and wings. Yet as Dorothea works off what Ashe thought would be her entree into it and becomes no more than herself, she finds it between them. 

For Dorothea, Ashe will stay longer in this bright, close, new world that overwhelms and delights her, where desire is time running fast and slow, the air at once rarefied and dense.

**Author's Note:**

> brought to you by the phrase "Ashe's tiddy holder" on twitter and girl in red becoming such a pervasive sapphic meme that I had to listen to it once to say I did


End file.
